How to… Un-diaper Your Child

HOW TO UN-DIAPER YOUR CHILD

July, 1999

Two blue-green eyes are watching me. Their owner seems to still be wondering where she is and why this world is now her environment.

While being spied on, my fingers are typing something on the keyboard. Pretending that the little spy was not noticed yet, from time to time I could see her cute little face starring at the small fingers her hands possessed. Her lips are moving in rhythm, whispering something heard and known only by her. I can almost feel my daughter’s questions and her thoughts.

From a faraway time, I sense a lost memory of a moment when I was also spying on my parents and in my head, many wonderings were bouncing. The fog embracing those past times is too dense to be able to decipher all the details.

The cute, little sweet girl traveling on this planet was only one and a half years old at that time. Her short path ’til now, revealed to me several characteristics of her future personality. Always proudly calling her “my daughter”, I could not stop myself from noticing how similar she was to me.

Her external appearance was always sending me back in time; being almost sure that the girl spying on me was the same one who appeared in thousands of pictures my parents had taken of me. Her personality is a faithful copy of the one who brought that little body into this world.

Being such an egotistic human being and almost praising myself, seeing the one who I proudly called and will always call “my daughter”, a huge happiness has always clothed me knowing how smart, beautiful, cute, thirsty for knowledge, she was; and most of all how stubborn.

Well… yes… I appreciate this one trait of hers; this stubbornness. Because my ego appreciates everything that I have and what I see that others also have. Stubbornness is a quality that, if you know how to control, many things will be fulfilled in your life.

Of course you must learn to use this stubbornness in a constructive way; and for sure until a specific age, most of the time your stubbornness will be shown in the moments when on purpose, you are doing exactly the opposite of what your parents tell you. You are doing this not because you consider that they don’t know and therefore not right, but because you want to show that you have your own personality and you are powerful enough to do whatever you want to do against their will. I know this very well; I tried it on my own skin.

In the moment when my sweet little daughter was deeply studying her little fingers, trying to copy my moves on the keyboard, my mind began to be occupied with a question, “How to renounce the diapers that she was still using?”

In fact this subject preoccupied my mind for several months prior but somehow I considered that it is best to attempt this act in the summer time. That time, being a sunny summer day, I was thinking of how to do this.

Of course, I studied lots of materials, articles and gathered advice from experts on how to un-diaper your little child. It was not so complicated but… I had a problem… I considered myself too busy to have time to wash her clothes by hand, in the first place. So, even if I thought for some time about this subject, I always postponed the starting moment.

“What are you doing there, sweetie? Do you like your fingers so much? Give mommy your fingers to kiss them” the silence in the room was interrupted by my voice.

Her cute blue-green eyes starred at me for a few seconds. After a moment, the look in my daughter’s eyes changed. It was something playful inside; it was so mirthful that I also felt the need to enter into this game. Before my voice could say anything else to the request to touch her fingers, the little girl playfully hid her hands behind her back. It was as though she wanted to say: “Can you see? I am doing what I want and not what you are asking me to”.

Bang!!!

My brain was hit again by a revelation; this was the best moment to start what I wanted to do and did not know how.

Pretending that I was still immersed in the “finger hiding game”, I brought my daughter’s potty chair in the room. Talking to myself in a low voice, but loud enough to be sure my daughter heard me, I said “Hmmm… this potty chair… we don’t need it anymore”. I then placed it near the corner of the room, far enough where it would not disturb our game but close enough to be seen.

I told my daughter that I needed to change her diaper and after taking it off, I pretended that I forgot to put a new one on, so I clothed her only with her stockings.

The finger game continued for a while. During it, I noticed how my daughter’s mood for doing exactly the opposite of what I was telling her, was increasing. We did this together until a point in time when I felt it was the moment to apply my idea; an idea I never saw in any expert’s advice.

Without any connection with what we were doing, just to be sure that her attention was still at maximum level because of the surprise, I said with a determined voice: “By the way… don’t even think to use that potty chair anymore. Just tell me when you need to potty, so I can put your diaper back on”.

The hiding game suddenly stopped and those cute blue-green eyes starred again at me. She needed only a few seconds to grasp the information and to let her playful mood embrace her again. The next second she run to the potty chair to sit on it and started to laugh out loud, showing me that she was the one who was deciding what to do. I stated once more my idea; just to be sure she would not forget my “request”.

“Oh… you naughty little girl! Didn’t I tell you not to even think about siting in that potty chair? Now, what can we do? You just did it.” I said smiling but pretending that she was more powerful than my decision. “At least from now on… don’t even think about peeing inside it. Sit if you want but when you need to pee, ask for the diaper. OK, sweetie?” I pushed my luck hoping that my invented method would work.

It seemed that my daughter enjoyed the potty chair game a lot, so she sat on it like a Queen, laughing and being amused by how she tricked her mother. I was trying hard not laugh also; but I wanted to be sure that she thought I was serious with my assertion.

After only a few seconds she stood up, and laughing she showed me the potty chair. It was filled.

“Victory” I yelled in my mind while my voice said to my sweet, stubborn daughter.

“Oh, oh, oh… you naughty girl! Didn’t I tell you not to even think about peeing in it? What am I going to do with you now? You are really one of a kind! Come here, you have to be punished!”

This was another game that we played a lot… the punishment game… I had to always run after her, of course pretending that I would catch her with a lot of effort and the punishment was a tickling session. Her laugh was always making me laugh with all my heart.

Can you imagine somehow that I didn’t have to wash her clothes anymore? Well… no… I had to. I had to wash her stockings.

But that was the only time I had to do it.

Because… because… the next game was…

“Don’t even think to take your stockings off when you want to pee in the potty chair”.

Since then, I was always wondering… What is in fact a game?